Music in Review: Performances by Sasha Cooke, Escher String Quartet and Ensemble Signal

The mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke performing on Thursday.CreditHiroyuki Ito for The New York Times

ESCHER STRING QUARTET

Alice Tully Hall

A sense of anxiety permeated the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s program on Sunday evening at Alice Tully Hall. The confessional nature of the works by Berg, Sibelius and Schubert reflected the composers’ distress about health and amorous problems, an underlying tension that surfaced with arresting nuance during the Escher String Quartet’s passionate performances.

The Escher (the violinists Adam Barnett-Hart and Aaron Boyd, the violist Pierre Lapointe and the cellist Dane Johansen) have become a welcome presence on the society’s roster. They vividly conveyed the emotional content of Berg’s “Lyric Suite,” written during a period of ill health and expressing in a code woven into the score the composer’s infatuation with the wife of a wealthy industrialist. The ensemble’s playing was notable for its ideal blend of savage energy and wistful introspection; the soprano Jennifer Zetlan sang expressively in the concluding Largo, set to a poem by Baudelaire.

Mr. Barnett-Hart played with tender melancholy the forlorn opening melody of Schubert’s “Rosamunde” Quartet, which reflected the composer’s unhappiness at the time of composition. The ensemble’s gorgeous tonal sheen rendered their performance of Sibelius’s String Quartet “Voces Intimae,” which concluded the program, luxuriant and emotive.

Sibelius, whose 150th anniversary is this year, completed the work while worrying about a possible cancer (which turned out to be benign). “What do you play after that?” Mr. Boyd said after the group stormed through its turbulent climax.

The answer? As an encore, they offered a glowing rendition of Gershwin’s “Lullaby.” VIVIEN SCHWEITZER

ENSEMBLE SIGNAL

Miller Theater

Ensemble Signal’s concert at the Miller Theater on Thursday evening, conducted by Brad Lubman, did almost everything a good concert should. It offered an evening of excellent music — two works by Bach, two by Michael Gordon — in fine performances.

But shouldn’t a concert in a series called “Bach, Revisited” also explain the connection, to the extent that it is not obvious? One simple question to Mr. Gordon, the featured composer, would suffice: What does Bach mean to you?

Paul Griffiths, the program annotator, made a game effort to find common elements in the music of Bach and Mr. Gordon: “energized lines playing over one another in a mirror maze,” “driving rhythm and self-similarity” and an “ear to the dance patterns of the epoch.”

To judge from the two Gordon works presented — “Dry” (2013, in its United States premiere) and “Hyper” (2014, in its New York premiere) — Mr. Griffiths was certainly right to point to energy and rhythm: the kind of motor rhythm beloved of Baroque masters as reshaped by modern-day Minimalists. “Dry,” notwithstanding its title, was juiced; it is pure energy constantly renewed by a jolting repeated-note motto until a change of texture near the end.

“Hyper” was equally driven — no surprise, this time — but also more complex, with textures that change perspectives and turn back on themselves. Mr. Gordon, in a brief note, speaks of “impossible geometry,” citing visual paradoxes in the Penrose Stairs and works by M. C. Escher.

Two Bach concertos afforded showcases for the noted keyboardist Kristian Bezuidenhout and two Signal players: the violinist Courtney Orlando and the oboist Christa Robinson. Unfortunately, Mr. Bezuidenhout’s soft-voiced harpsichord barely made itself heard over the sound of five string players using modern instruments.

And how, more precisely, did the Bach half relate to the Gordon half? JAMES R. OESTREICH

SASHA COOKE

Zankel Hall

The ample pleasures provided by the mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke are old-fashioned ones. There’s something about this singer’s sweet-tempered poise and wholesome restraint that seem to have emerged from an earlier, simpler time.

On Thursday evening at Zankel Hall, this was an impression that extended from her demure French-twist updo to her encores, “Give Him the Ooh-La-La” and “In the Still of the Night,” two Cole Porter songs from the 1930s. Ms. Cooke’s instrument — a twilight-tone mezzo, characterized by both velvety darkness and a luminous glow — has a rich, dignified reserve that seems to beg to come out accompanied by the crackle of a Victrola.

She made even a new work, Kevin Puts’s “Of All the Moons,” feel classic. Heard less than a week after some mixed reviews greeted the premiere of Mr. Puts’s ambitious operatic adaptation of “The Manchurian Candidate” at the Minnesota Opera, this more modest song cycle — to poems by Marie Howe filled with imagery of wind, water and moonlight — was a showcase for his craftsmanship.

The first song, “Sometimes the Moon Sat in the Well at Night,” followed a stark introductory set of piano chords with a vocal line dotted with exotic touches: dusky harmonies and curlicues of ornamentation. Ms. Cooke’s voice stayed steady in the gently billowing phrases of “Once or Twice or Three Times, I Saw Something,” the intense ending of “How You Can’t Move Moonlight” and the dusky focus of “Annunciation,” interspersed with rippling piano. (Julius Drake was her secure accompanist.) These songs suit her voice, but more important, they suit her style, soaring while remaining intimate.

While Ms. Cooke’s sound is warm, her artistry can be more poised than passionate. She is not an artist who easily evokes existential angst, as in “the dark basis of life” described in “Lasst mich ruhen,” one of four Liszt songs on the program. She didn’t adequately define the contrasting moods of Haydn’s magisterial solo cantata “Arianna a Naxos.”

The higher Ms. Cooke’s voice went, the less dependable and full it became, which was less of a problem in four suavely handled songs by Granados than it was in certain thin lines in Mahler’s four “Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen.” The smooth, even tone in the opening lines of his “Die zwei blauen Augen von meinem Schatz” were followed by an awkward upward reach.

But she captured the radiant restfulness of Liszt’s “Des Tages laute Stimmen schweigen,” its final moments hushed and rapt. Old-fashioned, in this case, never felt out of date. ZACHARY WOOLFE